random apocrypha

My mother’s phone line is out of order – has been for weeks. I reported the problem for her on the 31st and I’ve been patient but it’s hard. The ACMA website has a FAQ that states that all faults should be fixed within 3 business days at the worst. However, there’s a “get out of jail free” card that they can play, and which was played in this case: mass service disruptions.

True or not, a small industry player can blame outages on a third party – normally Telstra, I guess – and then all bets are off. Apparently there is some back-end Telstra issue in this case and, when I first called, I was told that Telstra had given Commander a date of the 11th of February – two weeks away at the time as the point at which all services should be restored. Fine, you think… maybe it’ll take time to get everything working, if we assume this wasn’t some stupid exchange fuckup. Given my mother has a working ADSL service over-top of the currently dead voice line, it’s not a simple cut cable that needs repairing.

Today I played the medical card and escalated the issue. That got people interested, and we hope to get this fixed tomorrow. I do find it strange that apparently everyone can throw up their hands and point fingers with some “mass disruption” excuse (whereas individual faults have a short guaranteed time-frame for repair). It’s statistically much more likely that a real mass disruption would affect a greater number of people with health issues, and that fixing such issues would be a bigger priority than the (hopefully) small number of individual faults that would dribble into the reporting system.

I haven’t seen any mention of a public or customer notification of the mass disruption that affects the relevant area (their website point to here). That’s something I’ll have to chase up; if they didn’t notify people they’re very naughty.